ACTUAL SIZE + EYE CONTACT

If paradise were to exist, all its spiders would be artists. They would sing, dance and make beautiful pictures.

The Actual Size series features the colourful courtship displays of minuscule Australian jumping spiders. They are surely the world’s smallest artists. Magnified hundreds of times their own size, we perceive all the magnificent colours, diverse structures and mesmerising patterns that the males have perfected to seduce their hard-to-get females.

The top right-hand border of this picture includes a portrait of the male and female of the species reproduced at actual size (to show scale). I marvel at the beauty of the pictures these tiny artists have collaboratively created. How can creatures with such minuscule brains have created such beauty and complexity? And while you might not believe me, they don’t just make beautiful pictures, they actually do sing and dance.

You can observe their courtship behaviour in my videos, On the Origins of Art I and II, featuring performing artists Maratus volans and Maratus splendens. The sounds they make were captured by a laser vibrometer and magnified for the human ear.

The virtuosity of the spider’s display has been made visible to the human eye by compiling around 900 individual photos taken at 30 microns. Using computer software, we stack them into one single perfectly-focussed image.

What we can’t see we can’t appreciate.

Maria Fernanda Cardoso, August 2021

[Focus stacked digital microphotography made in collaboration with Geoff Thompson and Andy Wang.]

The Maratus spiders of Australia are the most colourful, flamboyant, sexy, and charming spiders on the planet. I think if paradise existed, it would be inhabited by beautiful creatures such as these. Their use of colour, gesture, sound and movement makes them (in my opinion) amongst the most sophisticated visual and performing artists in the world. They are also the smallest performers I know of—on average about 4-6mm in size, smaller than a grain of rice.

The video series On the Origins of Art shows their incredible courtship ritual. The male has to try extremely hard (both in visual communication as well as in charm and perseverance) to be ‘chosen’ by her. She exercises her right to choose, and drives him to display an excess of vibrant colour and performance virtuosity in a complex courtship ritual.

This process is known as ‘sexual selection’ and was first observed by Darwin in the display of peacock birds’ courtship. As is well known, these birds utilise beauty, pattern, colour, gesture and sound in order to attract a mate and hence reproduce their species.

Just like peacock birds and humans, the Maratus are highly visual animals. And like us, they are aware of their looks and the impact this has on the other’s reactions. They are deliberate in their use of gesture, form, colour, and pattern.

Their eyes are very important, so much so that they have eight of them. You can see them gazing at each other and making micro-gestures with their pedipalps and third legs. They use eye contact to communicate with each other, as well as sensing vibrations that travel through the ground. We had to record these sounds with a special ‘laser vibrometer’ for the video On the Origins of Art, as the tapping sounds they make are not audible to the human ear.

The thing that struck me about these spiders is how minuscule they are—and yet they’re also very sophisticated. That’s why I joke “You don’t need a big brain to be an artist”.

To make people more aware of their diminutive proportions, I place a life-size image of the spider on the border of the Actual Size print series. These are microscopic deep focus photographs of their abdomens which we can appreciate as abstract paintings that reveal the magnificent detail of their structures and diverse patterns. They ‘paint’ with pigment and structural colour (the colour produced by the refraction of light). Viewers can also appreciate the different shapes of their scales thanks to the magnification of the image 195,000 times its actual size.

But be careful of where you step, as you could be crushing one of these minuscule and talented artists. There are more than 85 different species within the Maratus genus, and they have a great diversity of pattern and coloration. I will continue to photograph them one season at a time—the Australian Spring is the ideal window of opportunity to find and photograph these beautiful creatures. In 2020, we focused on Maratus spiders from the region of West Australia.

To create these images, we have used highly-sophisticated microscopic technology to produce large-megapixel, deep-focus images. Each is made from a composite of up to 1000 images. In many cases, two separate stacks were used and merged with Photoshop. The camera moves fractions of a micron at a time, taking photos with overlapping focus from top to bottom of the specimen. Then specialised focus-stacking software combines all the sharp pixels. Because the automatic algorithm is confused by overlapping focussed structures, careful sub-stacking and hand editing is necessary. Depth of field is a problem that microscopy and macrophotography always have, and this is a way to solve that problem.

All the digital microscopy was done in collaboration with the renowned scientific imager Geoff Thompson and entomologist Andy Wang, who is an artist in microscopic specimen preparation. We used a Visionary Digital System owned by the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia to make these spectacular images.

Maria Fernanda Cardoso
Dec 2020
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Digital imaging in collaboration with Geoff Thompson and Andy Wang, Queensland Museum.
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“I do not subscribe to human superiority, and I am in awe with the world of the small.”

"You don't need a big brain to be an artist"

Maria Fernanda Cardoso

‘I love working at the edge of perception. What fascinates me about the small is that it’s even more complex than the big.’ María Fernanda Cardoso

María Fernanda Cardoso has been working innovatively with animals and the natural world for almost four decades. Her fascination is powered by a profound regard for the beauty and sophistication of nature and our place within it, as well as a desire to explore and represent behaviours and phenomena that support her ideas of art, culture, aesthetics, performance and, essentially, the drive to make art.

Cardoso’s passion for the natural world was sparked in childhood as she explored the lush wetlands around her home in Bogotá, Colombia. In pre-Colombian Indigenous cultures, animals were both abundant and sacred. As a young artist, she was interested in how human cultures revered certain creatures and she incorporated the dried forms of lizards, snakes, frogs, grasshoppers and flies into her poetic, pared-back sculptures and installations of the 1990s.

In 1994 Cardoso moved to San Francisco where she began exploring making art with living creatures – fleas. Her internationally acclaimed Cardoso Flea Circus starred ‘Professor Cardoso’ and a troupe of cat fleas that performed incredible feats, such as weight lifting, tightrope walks, high dives, trapeze and tango-dancing in an intricate, miniature circus arena. The tiny performers were filmed using a high-powered camera that magnified their acts and projected simultaneously onto screens for the audience. The Cardoso Flea Circus was first presented in 1994 and toured until 2000. With this, Cardoso had revived a lost art form – the widely popular flea circuses of the 1800s – and transformed it into a contemporary art performance. The Cardoso Flea Circus involved years of intense work and observation to learn techniques that harnessed the fleas’ innate behaviours. Her research revealed fresh perspectives on the species, their anatomy and the power of their drive for survival.

Cardoso now lives and works in Sydney, Australia. The artist’s commitment to aesthetics, sensory perception and the natural world has diversified with numerous endemic species to delve into. Her extraordinary Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO) presented in the 2012 Biennale of Sydney was the subject of her Doctoral thesis that explored the uniqueness and complexity of the reproductive organs in various invertebrates. Exquisitely carved sculptural forms of penises of Tasmanian spiders, and observations of hundreds of other creatures, were presented and sensitively illuminated in tall display cases. Cardoso’s MoCO was both wondrous and scientifically compelling; it experimented with traditional natural history displays and very new technologies, with the artist’s hand, mind and eye ever present across more than 450 individual items.

From this, the artist’s recent, ongoing project starring tiny Australian jumping spiders, the Maratus, or ‘peacock spiders’ had its beginnings in 2014.

Of her subject, Cardoso says: ‘The Maratus spiders of Australia are the most colourful, flamboyant, sexy, and charming spiders on the planet… To me, their use of colour, gesture, sound and movement makes them (…) sophisticated visual and performing artists... They are also the smallest performers I know of—on average about 1/8 inch in size, smaller than a grain of rice.’

In fact, they are so tiny, they’re almost imperceptible. Cardoso is fascinated by the courting behaviour of the male Maratus – his canny movements, patterning and iridescent colour, his use of sound and scent to seduce a female. He seeks eye contact – he has eight eyes – and signals gracefully by lifting his legs and waving, swaying and tapping to impress her with his artful dance and beat. She, for her part, exercises her right to choose. The pièce de résistance is the display of his colourful abdominal flaps, opening like a peacock’s tail. The Maratus are highly visual beings, just like humans. Cardoso says they are aware of their looks and the impact this awareness has on the other’s reactions. They are deliberate in their use of gesture, form, colour, and pattern.

Cardoso typically works for many years on her investigations, and collaborates with cinematographers, scientists, museologists, 3D modellers and technicians. For this series of exquisite pigment prints, Spiders of Paradise (2018-ongoing), Actual Size and Eye Contact (2016-ongoing), the artist collaborated with renowned scientific imager Geoff Thompson who specialises in deep focus microscopy at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia. This technology allows for great depth of focus with extreme levels of magnification by focus stacking hundreds of photographs into one single, sharp image. Usually at least two of these focus-stacked images are combined in Photoshop to produce the final composite image, which often is combined from over a thousand photographs. The result is a magnificent and detailed photograph, where every scale and hair structure on the Maratus’ abdomen is magnified and acutely visible. The images reveal the ‘composition' of each ‘artist spider’s' particular, colourful pattern – his individual scales are a different colour, and his patterned abdomen creates a unique, vibrant composition in itself.

To this interdisciplinary collaboration of art, biology and micro technology, Cardoso contributes an artist’s perspective with characteristic passion, imagination and aesthetic rigour. The series confirms her conviction that an aesthetic sense – and not only in humankind – is developed through the forces of evolution and sexual selection. Art, and everything that is beautiful, extravagant and original is often the result of the need for desire, attraction and, ultimately, reproduction.

ACTUAL SIZE + EYE CONTACT

This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.